The Bonds of Love

By Cecilia Tan

Jiro's lineage once proudly served the nobility as samurai: protectors of royalty with a legacy of sword and rope. But though rich in tradition, in the modern age the family is penniless. And after cataclysmic events, Jiro has lost everything, including everyone he ever cared about and maybe even his mind. He is kept in a hospital amnesia ward, catatonic and unspeaking until a charity visit from the Crown Princess rouses him miraculously.

Ami is the sole heir of the Emperor, fresh out of Harvard and looking to both sow her wild oats and create real change for women in her role as a public figure. But her father and his head of security want her kept safe and sound: caged like a bird for her protection.

Ami will do anything to get out from under their control. Little does she know there are true dangers waiting for their chance to strike, a chance that comes when the princess slips away from her bodyguards and disappears in disguise into the underground world of sex clubs and rope bondage performers. Will the disguise be enough to keep her safe from the assassins on her trail? And what about this mysterious stranger, this Jiro, who seems fated to meet her again? What will she receive when she surrenders herself, bound and helpless, to his rope bondage: unbearable pleasure or ultimate pain?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Riverdale Avenue Books
• Release date: Dec 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781626015319

Cecilia Tan

Cecilia Tan is “simply one of the most important writers, editors, and innovators in contemporary American erotic literature,” according to Susie Bright. Her BDSM romance novel Slow Surrender (Hachette/Forever, 2013) won the RT Reviewers Choice Award in Erotic Romance and the Maggie Award for Excellence from the Georgia Romance Writers. Her books include the ground-breaking erotic short story collections Black Feathers (HarperCollins), White Flames (Running Press), and Edge Plays (Circlet Press), and the erotic romances Slow Surrender, Slow Seduction, and Slow Satisfaction (Hachette/Forever), The Prince’s Boy (Circlet Press), and The Hot Streak (Riverdale Avenue Books). Her short stories have appeared in Ms. Magazine, Nerve, Best American Erotica, Asimov’s Science Fiction, and tons of other places. She was inducted into the Saints & Sinners Hall of Fame for GLBT writers in 2010, was a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Leather Association in 2004, and won the inaugural Rose & Bay Awards for Best Fiction in 2010 for her crowdfunded web fiction serial Daron’s Guitar Chronicles. She lives in the Boston area with her lifelong partner corwin and three cats. Find out more at www.ceciliatan.com.

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The Bonds of Love Copyright © 2019 by Cecilia Tan

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All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

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Digital ISBN: 9781626015319

First Edition December 2019

Praise for Cecilia Tan

Cecilia Tan is simply one of the most important writers, editors, and innovators in contemporary American erotic literature. What’s just as remarkable is that her insight, wit, and craft has only become beguiling each year. I am always interested in what she has to say, and I look forward to her every new [work].—Susie Bright

Cantabrigian scribe Cecilia Tan [is] one of the nation’s best-known enchantresses of the erotic fiction genre.—The Boston Phoenix

CECILIA TAN CERTAINLY knows her way around erotica.

—The Boston Phoenix (Sex Divas of Boston, Feature)

Tan can write erotica and combine it with... almost anything and make it completely alluring, arresting, and entirely believable.—True Review

Inventive and playful, Tan exhibits great imagination.—Penthouse.com

[Her] best work fuses [fiction] with sexual practices beyond the norm. Amy Tan it ain’t.

—Harper’s Bazaar Singapore

Tan’s marvelous descriptive abilities ... reach out of the page to the reader with a tremendous urgency. There’s something for everyone here.—Paramour Magazine

Tan herself is writing about many other things when she writes explicitly about sex: the influence or people’s placement in social class and gender, race, and power groups in influencing sexual attraction, sexual practice, and sexuality.

—New York Review of Science Fiction

"Everyone knows Cecilia Tan is the queen of hot, but she’s also the queen of wit and angst and voice."

—Christina Lauren, New York Times Bestselling author of Beautiful Bastard and Sweet Filthy Boy

Cecilia Tan writes erotic romance the way it was meant to be written: full of emotion, intensity, and chemistry that’s so hot it burns the page.

—Tara Sue Me, New York Times Bestselling author of The Submissive

Cecilia Tan transcends time, space, gravity, and cultural norms in her line of work: erotic science fiction.—San Francisco Weekly

For Brian

who was my hero when I was at the end of my rope

Acknowledgments

Thanks to this story’s first readers, Midori and Laura Antoniou, whose collective creative energy spurred me to weave this tale in the first place, and to Lori Perkins who spurred all three of us to pursue our bondage fantasies in book form. Midori also played tour guide for me on two research trips to Japan, where she took me to bondage and fetish bars and we ate our way across Kyoto. A shout-out to all the backers of the Silk Threads Kickstarter, and to my patrons on Patreon! And love always to corwin, who makes sure I’m well fed even when I’m writing a book.

Chapter One

Nagasaki: 1945

What is one person’s happiness when measured against the fabric of a nation? This is the question my elders asked in a thousand ways, every time the subject of my marriage came up. I knew, of course, the expected answer. The nation and our society should be far more important than the happiness of one person, or even of two, if you counted me and my miserable bride-to-be. It was four people if you counted her and the man she truly wanted to marry, and me and the woman I truly wanted to marry...

How many of us would it take to change everything? I imagined an unbroken chain, from the man she loved, to the woman his family wanted him to marry, and the man she would have been arranged to... and on and on. Or was I the only madman who wanted to tear the fragile silk of our so-called society apart?

Jiro.

I looked up from the sake cup tilted between my fingers. Akio was trying to get my attention.

No mooning about, my friend said, with a warning look. I didn’t take you out drinking so you could mope.

I’ll be happy when I am with Chiyo and not sooner, I said with a sigh. We were in one of the large establishments on Mirayama Street, where there have been brothels and entertainment houses for hundreds of years. A burst of laughter from the next room washed over us like rain, as someone must have told a hilarious joke.

Quite suddenly a man pushed aside the thin, rice paper door, and slipped inside, shutting it behind him. He wore a disheveled military uniform, his face quite red. He had a jug of sake in his hands.

Akio stood, an imposing presence ready to throw the man out if he had mistakenly stumbled into the wrong room, but then the officer spoke.

Are you M-Mizushi... are you ’chiro’s brother? he asked drunkenly.

I am, I answered, too surprised to do anything else. My brother had been killed six years before, in Nanking. I had barely known him, as he had been at military school when I was a child, and then in the army, where I was unfit to follow.

The officer did not so much sit as have his legs collapse under him at our low table, and he leaned on his elbow, proffering the jug. Here, then. A gift from the general. Let us drink a toast to your departed brother.

Akio and I exchanged glances. I’ll pour, my friend said, taking the jug from the drunken man with his meaty but deft hands, and filling our cups.

We drank in silence. It would be bad luck, I thought, to secretly blame my brother for dying and putting me in the position I was in. I couldn’t ever be him, not with my bad foot. I had been treated like a child most of my life, as if because